The 18th Conversation will be held in June 11-15 2013 at the State Univ. of New York at Albany. The Keynote evening lectures will be delivered by Nobel Laureates Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute, Israel and Jack Szostak, Harvard, on origin of life and evolution. The Conversation will cover the following areas of structural biology Origin of Life and Evolution, RNA and the complexities, Exciting developments and breakthroughs in computational biology, Enzyme Dynamics, Protein Interactions, Proteins: Interactions and Folding, Intrinsically Disordered Proteins, Virus Structure & Function, DNA-Protein Recognition, Nanopores, DNA nanotechnology, Genome Weak Links. The subjects will be covered by invited lectures and poster discussion papers. There will be a total of 83 lectures, 55 by senior scientists and 28 by young researchers. Lectures by young researchers (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and starting faculty) will be based on selection from abstracts submitted for poster presentation. 5.5 hours of the symposium time will be left vacant until abstracts are received so that a significant number of lectures can be selected from the abstracts. The number of posters presented will be some 200. Out of a total of 83 talks, a minimum of 30 will be delivered by female scientists. The program will admit some 400 scientists from over 20 Nations.